Zuckerberg, Brin, Page disappear from Google+ top rankings

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was one of the first to join rival social network Google+. Like Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Zuckerberg accumulated thousands of followers on Google+ within days of joining. Now Zuck, along with the Google founders, are MIA on the social network’s rankings, having seemingly disappeared from the top of SocialStatistics.com’s Google+ list.

Zuckerberg, who was previously in first place, has been replaced by Robert Scoble. Ironically, Scoble was the first to confirm that Zuckerberg’s account was in fact real. He currently has 3,645 friends and 43,131 followers.

Zuckerberg apparently changed his privacy settings to stop showing the number of friends and followers, which bumped him out of first place. And Zuck’s not the only one who changed his settings. Along with Brin and Page, Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts, Google’s SVP of social networking Vic Gundotra, and Google’s VP of Location and Local Services Marissa Mayer, all changed their profiles last night and have gone missing from the list. You can still find their profiles in Google+’s search. However, as of today, you can’t see their number of friends and followers.

The only high-up Google employee still on the list is VP of Product Bradley Horowitz, rated at No. 7. Not surprisingly, the top people left on Google+ are somehow related to the tech industry. They’re either tech bloggers or writers, or full-on tech nerds, like Tom from MySpace who’s in fifth place, or Felicia Day, actress, writer and web video creator loved by nerds everywhere, who’s in fourth place. Tech journalist Leo Laporte is No. 2 with 43, 975 followers, and Digg founder Kevin Rose is in third place with 38,287 followers.

Should we be worried that Google’s founders have made their number of followers and friends private? Is this something we all should be doing?